of St Patrick.  But she dies because of the wild wailing for her loss of the fairy-host, whom she can hear but cannot see, calling to her out of the darkened sky to come back to her home.  And in her sorrow and the battle in her between the love of Christ and of Faerie, she dies.  That is a symbol, not intended as such by its conceiver, but all the more significant, of the transition time.  Short as it is, few tales, perhaps, are more deeply charged with spiritual meaning.

[4] I speak here of the better known of the two versions of this encounter of the pagan with the Christian spirit.  There are others in which the reconciliation is carried still further.  One example is to be found in the Colloquy of the Ancients (SILVA GADELICA).  Here Finn and his companions are explicitly pronounced to be saved by their natural virtues, and the relations of the Church and the Fenian warriors are most friendly.

Independent of these three cycles, but often touching them here and there, and borrowing from them, there are a number of miscellaneous tales which range from the earliest times till the coming of the Danes.  The most celebrated of these are the Storming of the Hostel with the death of Conary the High King of Ireland, and the story of the Boru tribute.  Two examples of these miscellaneous tales of a high antiquity are contained in this book—­King Iubdan and King Fergus and Etain and Midir.  Both of them have great charm and delightfulness.

Finally, the manner in which these tales grew into form must be remembered when we read them.  At first, they were not written down, but recited in hall and with a harp’s accompaniment by the various bardic story-tellers who were attached to the court of the chieftain, or wandered singing and reciting from court to court.  Each bard, if he was a creator, filled up the original framework of the tale with ornaments of his own, or added new events or personages to the tale, or mixed it up with other related tales, or made new tales altogether attached to the main personages of the original tale—­episodes in their lives into which the bardic fancy wandered.  If these new forms of the tales or episodes were imaginatively true to the characters round which they were conceived and to the atmosphere of the time, they were taken up by other bards and became often separate tales, or if a great number attached themselves to one hero, they finally formed themselves into one heroic story, such as that which is gathered round Cuchulain, which, as it stands, is only narrative, but might in time have become epical.  Indeed, the Tain approaches, though at some distance, an epic.  In this way that mingling of elements out of the three cycles into a single Saga took place.

Then when Christianity came, the Irish who always, Christians or not, loved their race and its stories, would not let them go.  They took them and suffused them with a Christian tenderness, even a Christian forgiveness.  Or they inserted Christian endings, while they left the rest of the stories as pagan as before.  Later on, while the stories were still learned by the bards and recited, they were written down, and somewhat spoiled by a luxurious use of ornamental adjectives, and by the weak, roving and uninventive fancy of men and monks aspiring to literature but incapable of reaching it.